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Dear School Certifying Official (SCO),
We hope this email finds you well and we wanted to clarify the debt consolidation report message that went out on June 26, 2024. As mentioned, certain tuition and fees and Yellow Ribbon debts will be recouped from subsequent, congruent payments for the same student. These changes are due to mandatory system upgrades during the progress of integrating Post-9/11 GI Bill® (Chapter 33) payments processing from the Benefits Delivery Network (BDN) to the Enterprise Management of Payments, Workload, and Reporting (eMPWR) system.
This recoupment change is a Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) requirement that the BDN system was unable to accommodate due to BDN’s limitations. This recoupment policy serves to prevent overpayments, as it proactively accounts for payments already made for a certified period. eMPWR is capable of supporting these requirements and therefore VA is implementing the debt recoupment in order to be in compliance with all applicable VA policies and procedures.
We value our partnership and the work we’ve done together to modernize our systems and we wanted to provide context of when, and how, the debt recoupment process works based on the last message we sent to you. What this means for you and your program is:
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Debt recoupment for tuition and fees or Yellow Ribbon will only occur when the debt is for the same facility code, student, and an overlapping term.
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Debt recoupment will only occur when there is subsequent, congruent (there is at least one day of overlap) payments for the student.
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Debt recoupment will only occur from similar receivables. Meaning that a tuition and fees recoupment would not collect a Yellow Ribbon debt and a Yellow Ribbon recoupment would not collect a tuition and fees debt.
VA expects that debt recoupment actions should be a relatively rare experience for you, and we wanted to ensure that you were proactively notified of the change. The SCO Handbook will also be updated to include information about debt recoupment actions and attached are a few examples of what the debt recoupment would look like.
While there may be a brief adjustment period, this update will help bring Post-9/11GI Bill payments into a modernized payment platform allowing VA to be fully compliant with all policies and procedures. We would like to again stress that these debt recoupment procedures will only take effect when the facility code, student, and an overlapping term all align. Please remember you can always contact VA to request debt listings through Ask VA if you need to know all students with debts and information on their associated debts. Thank you for your patience during this system modernization effort.
Respectfully,
Education Service
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